Solution: Netbeans 8 not working on Ubuntu 15.10

Netbeans is one of my beloved day to day applications. Yesterday, when I installed Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) on my computer, Netbeans started to hang on the startup screen, specifically at the Loading Modules phase. It took me hours looking for solutions on the internet; and reinstalling different versions of the Java Development Framework didn’t seem to help.

Finally I found the following fix at an Ubuntu forum, which turned out to be very simple to apply.

If you are using OpenJDK 7:

sudo vim /etc/java-7-openjdk/accessibility.properties

or if you’re using OpenJDK 8:

sudo vim /etc/java-8-openjdk/accessibility.properties

The file contains one single line. The only thing you have to do is to comment it out like this:

# assistive_technologies=org.GNOME.Accessibility.AtkWrapper

Even if you did not install explicitly OpenJDK, I recommend you to give these files a try. They may be there if any other application installed OpenJDK as a dependency.